location, the higher-fidelity answer
we can give to our analysis and provide a better functioning network,”
says Joshua Fischer, chief of the
data collection, analysis, modeling
and simulation branch at CERDEC.

“It all boils down to accuracy and
fidelity — the more accurate inputs
we have, the more accurate outputs
we will have.

While the Navy and Air Force work
on large models, the Army is focusing on the other end of the scale.

“We work on microscale modeldevelopment, tailoring our programtoward scales less than one kilo-meter and optimizing for urbanenvironments, so we want to makesure we can detail flow fieldswithin dense urban environments,”the Army Research Lab’s MacCallsays. “We also look at mountainousterrain. Because of the high resolu-tion, we don’t do these models glob-ally, but simulating over a smallerarea, using coarser data to drivethe boundary conditions, whichwe then use to figure out how theflow will be impacted by featuressuch as buildings, mountains andhills. The main program is calledthe Atmospheric Boundary LayerEnvironment (ABLE) model devel-opment program. We began aboutfour years ago, looking at complexterrain and urban areas.”ARL’s in-house model develop-ments are unique to the Army’sshort-scale time domain. The workMacCall’s branch does at Adelphiis based in part on experimentaldata collected by ARL’s AtmosphericDynamics Branch (White SandsMissile Range, NM), looking at thelower two miles of the atmosphere.

“A program we began almosttwo years ago is the MeteorologicalSensor Array,” MacCall says. “Thereare at least 36 towers in our initialarray that will become operationalby the end of summer 2017.”The Meteorological SensorArray is located at the Jornada

Modern supercomputers are among the most powerful tools in the military weather forecaster’s
arsenal to run high-resolution weather models in a very short time.

Air Force weather experts inspect a remote weather station to keep warfighters in the field up
to date on the environmental conditions they will face.